That's where Rosetta (nasdaq: RSTA - news - people) comes in: Its technology can help scientists discern what proteins each gene makes.
RNA's job is to carry messages from genes to the cell's shopfloor, where the proteins they express are manufactured, the transcriptome can be used to define the range of proteins that a gene can produce.
If genes are making several proteins, knowing that a gene is involved in a disease isn't enough.
Ravicher, an engineer and lecturer in law at Cardozo, said the court should simply declare that the natural sequence of proteins that make up a gene is not eligible for patent.
FORBES: Big Question For Supreme Court: Can You Patent A Gene?
When a clock gene is switched on, it directs the cell to produce proteins, which eventually trigger a signal that switches the gene off.
The technology can also find cases in which different proteins are produced by a single gene.
Although the protein produced by each gene is unique, most proteins can be divided into a series of recognisable modules known as domains.
ECONOMIST: The first complete DNA sequence of an animal is now in the bag
To find out more, the team made proteins from the various versions of the mammoth gene.
The first science project earmarked for Blue Gene is to model folding of human proteins.
It might even be possible to use gene therapy to allow cells to produce proteins that are not so willing to aggregate.
Dr Tsien's contribution was to tinker with the GFP gene, and the genes of related proteins found in corals, to produce other colours.
Using a software program to compare the sequences of the genes that give the instructions for making egg proteins, they show that teleosts with floating eggs share a gene called VtgAa.
In the late 1980s Genentech scientist Napoleone Ferrara had isolated the gene for producing VEGF(genes are instructions for manufacturing proteins).
The researchers therefore synthesised messengers corresponding to the various versions of the ancient gene, fed them to some ribosomes, and collected the proteins that came out.
The system is complex: Each gene is thought to produce, on average, five separate substances, mostly proteins, and these products interact with each other.
The theory behind targeted cancer drugs is simple: find the key gene mutations driving growth of tumors and then devise drugs that block those mutated proteins.
Lander and his colleagues say evolution's lab book points to only 30, 000 genes--if a gene is defined as a stretch of DNA that codes for one of the proteins from which the body is built.
Researchers have not yet chosen which protein they will fold when Blue Gene is finished a few years down the road, but Horn said that simple proteins will be tested before then.
Driven by the idea that he might discover something totally new, he labored nights and weekends for months, filtering out thousands of other proteins until he finally separated the right one in 1989 and cloned the human version of the gene that produces it.
应用推荐